This is the main piece of hardware that most of my homelab projects run on at the minute. It has 5 drives in it, most of which are 2TB but one of which is 12TB, and I'm planning to swap another 2TB out to be 10TB once the 10TB drive eventually arrives, I've got it configured to have 2 drive fault proection though so the actual capacity in terms of storage is about 6TB.
I don't use this a lot a lot but I do want to use it more, it's essentially a self hosted drive, similar to google drive or one drive, even with the capability for multiple users to collaborate on one document at the same time.
As always, and ultimately what really started me on the homelab journey, is my plex media server that the media of which fills up most of the terrabytes on my synology NAS. I also have a fair few *arrs and ombi setup to go alongside it but have decided to not include that on this page as I intend to write another page dedicated to it for educational purposes in the hopefully not too distant future!
Now this is the semi-fun part, on my synology I have docker installed which allows me to use all the below containers for various different services.
I used to manually have one big docker compose yaml file of all the configs for every service and use the command line to control everything, but this year I finally made the switch to portainer which lets you manage containers and have them in different stacks etc all from a web portal which I've been finding so much easier.
The first of many new additions in 2025 for me is koillection, which is a cute little collection management tool that I've been slowly adding some of my toy collections into.
The second new addition! Paperless-ngx is meant to be great for organising all sorts of documents n such and I'm hopefully to especially have all my medical records etc nicely organised on this eventually, as well as keep track of some other things in future.
This isn't technically new for me as I tried to use it in my last home but my housemates weren't really up to the task of using it so it didn't get used much, but !!! I moved into my own home at the end of 2024 and live on my own again and it's been super helpful to have my regular chores tracked with grocy as well as I've been slowly adding in different items' stocks to see how that plays out for me. With the chores I've also set it up so I've got barcodes (known as grocycodes by grocy, lol) printed out and stuck to items related to different chores so that I get the added novelty of scanning the barcode to mark a chore as done, which has been motivating me to do more chores which is nice!
Traefik is a reverse proxy which helps make it a lot easier to have everything under one domain and where relevant I can make stuff accessible outside of my network with a bit of router port forwarding configuration, I don't have this enabled fully at the moment though as I want to get something like Authentik setup for extra security reasons.
So this is another new one for me for 2025! I don't have the AI features that it advertises enabled but I'm hoping I'll still find it helpful for, well, hoarding. It's meant to let you bookmark stuff and organise it as well as has the functionality to archive a copy of it at the time of bookmarking which I think is cool.
Raspberry Pi
Okay so this is a returning piece of hardware that was what I first used with an external SSD to host a plex server 3 or so years ago. But it is making a return for the sole purpose listed below.
DNS based ad blocking! I'm still fiddling with different blocklists and I don't really notice much of a difference in terms of day to day usage because I already use UBlock Origin for adblocking and my computer and internet are both pretty fast, but apparently over a third of my network traffic is being blocked by pihole so that's a significant chunk of bandwidth saved and tracking prevented.